One of the first steps when building your WordPress website will be to determine what theme you should use for your website. But how do you know which theme will meet your needs?This guide will help you make those decisions more easily and explain what to look for when choosing your theme.

We were invited to team up with the Insaka eCommerce Academy to create online course content.Insaka is committed to helping entrepreneurs start and grow their online businesses to avoid mistakes and accelerate learning, growth and online success!We have developed high-value step-by-step video courses in conjunction with Insaka on topics ranging from search engine optimisation...

When emotion meets technology

We may not associate emotion with technology, however, user experience (UX) and the design of that system experience incorporates a fair amount of empathy.As we previously highlighted in our UX blog post series, UX relates to any aspect of a person’s interaction with a system, while user experience design (UXD) refers...

Site engagement is hailed as a major contributing factor to a successful website, particularly with the attention of online user’s being spread so thin.Content engagement metrics from free tools, such as Google Analytics, can show you how your website content matches user intent and as a result, profitability.Before you choose which metrics to track...

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential if you want your website to be found organically in search results, but how do you gauge the success of your SEO campaigns? Some of the best tools are free and easy to use, providing a wealth of SEO information, such as Google...

There has been a lot of recent activity in the search engine optimisation (SEO) industry regarding robots.txt. We thought we’d delve a little deeper into what robots.txt is, how it works, what changes are currently taking place and how best to use this function to improve your SEO.

A very brief history...

We attended the Connect eCommerce Summit where major players in the South African eCommerce field shared their industry expertise, insights and knowledge. Speaker topics ranged from Designing your next Dollar, Building a Profitable eCommerce Business, The Future of Digital eCommerce in Africa as well as whether eCommerce...

Semantica was recently invited to a WordPress Expert Panel Meetup which covered topics ranging from hosting to hacking, search engine optimisation and social media. A question submitted on sli.do was what current SEO techniques should be focused on? Your browser...

What is a staging site?

In it’s simplest form, a staging site is a clone of your live site that is not available on the public domain and is only accessible to listed administrators. The easiest way to create a staging site is by using a staging plugin, such as WP Staging....

In this blog post we highlight the key takeaways from a presentation by tech researcher, Arthur Goldstuck, on the results from the largest-ever online retail survey undertaken in South Africa. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=581&v=loM9FsNiMdc[/embed]

The demographics of online retail in South Africa

Age: The percentage of South Africans shopping online regularly is very small. The...

The furore over the release of WordPress 5.0 has intensified with the sudden announcement that the latest version will be released today. While industry complaints pile up regarding the launch time and short notice period, accessibility issues - particularly for users with disabilities, as well as outstanding bugs that have not been...

According to The Merging Future technological advancement is developing at such a rapid rate that computers double their capabilities every 12 to 18 months, along with this progression we see the continuous...

Following the first VAT increase that South Africa has seen in 25 years, coming into effect on 1 April 2018, we thought it would be important to ensure that you know how to update your VAT in WooCommerce.To update existing VAT in WooCommerce, two scenarios exist. The first is that...

So, having a website is much like having a car – you quickly realise that management and maintenance is necessary, but very often, you’re not the expert and would rather just have someone knowledgeable take care of it for you.

With Cape Town at Level 5 Water Restrictions, Semantica Digital has decided to release some free posters highlighting the importance of saving water in Cape Town and the Western Cape.Download and print these posters to put up in your workplace, at home or at your short & long term accommodation properties.If you need something designed,...

We previously wrote about The Art of (Search Advertising) War, which featured a small section on AdWords extensions. We would like to expand on that and provide you with a breakdown on what extensions you should be making use of and the best practices to follow.How do ad extensions benefit you? Read more

If you compare your AdWords account to a war, with search advertising as your battlefield, then your ads are your army on the front line.If you launch keyword missiles that are not perfectly targeted and highly optimised, they may land in range of your target, however, they will not have an impact.

Business intelligence technology provider Similar Tech reports that while Magento is the undisputed leader when it comes to e-commerce software, there are players within the industry that are growing at a much faster rate, meaning that the current ranking could look very different at the end of 2017. Read more

While Gmail adverts are not a new development, if you are not making use of them in your paid advertising arsenal, you should be. Gmail ads are run through AdWords, they are expandable and appear at the top of tabs in Gmail. These interactive ads can expand into email-sized ads that...

You may have noticed green lock keys next to the URL of your online search results. The green lock marks pages that make use of HTTPS, which is the web’s secure protocol compared to the older HTTP version. Read more

Term of the day

Content marketing is a marketing technique that involves creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.